


To Protect and Serve

by ransom191



Category: Shameless (US)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-10
Updated: 2014-03-09
Packaged: 2018-01-15 05:36:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1293301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ransom191/pseuds/ransom191
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mandy inadvertently becomes protector of the hand whores.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. It's none of Mandy's business, so why does she get herself involved in these things? Jesus fucking Christ.

One day, Mandy comes in through the kitchen door and catches Svetlana trying to steal a gun out of the filing cabinet they always keep well-stocked.

"What the fuck do you think you’re doing?" Mandy says, and then she sets the bags she was carrying down on the counter, because it’s a lot easier to look intimidating when your arms aren’t full of groceries. She watches as her sister-in-law pulls her hand and the pistol it’s holding out of her purse, looking guilty.

"I need gun," Svetlana answers, like she’s not backing down, but Mandy doesn’t meet any resistance when she wrenches the gun out of her hand. She takes a quick look, the safety isn’t even on, it’s fucking loaded, and that dumbass was going to jostle it around in her purse until fuck knows when. Idiot.

"I need gun," Svetlana says again, persistent, like she’s not going to let it go. Mandy asks her what the fuck for, and she tells her about The Alibi being robbed. She tells her how none of the men are going to protect anything, and she is going to have to do it herself, and Mandy rolls her eyes because  _no shit._

Still, Mandy’s not about to go handing out guns to everyone who asks for one. That’s a horrible business plan and also, she’s not 100% sure she can trust Svetlana. She knows next-to-nothing about her.

Instead, Mandy gives her a nasty-looking serrated knife with a curved tip and lots of blood stains. Svetlana looks disappointed, but it’s the best she’s going to get, and she must know that, because she takes it, tucks it into her purse where she tried to slip the gun.

Mandy doesn’t particularly like Svetlana, but she also doesn’t want her to get torn to shreds by some asshole out of his mind on PCP. She’s confident the knife will work.

It doesn’t.

Or, well, maybe it would have, except Svetlana isn’t the one who gets attacked.

Instead, she brings home some girl, whimpering and whining with three broken ribs. The girl looks Mandy’s age, maybe, it’s hard to tell with all that makeup, and she doesn’t speak a single word of English. Svetlana tells Mandy her name, but she forgets it almost immediately.

Svetlana mentions that maybe Mandy would know how to bandage her up, and Mandy’s conflicted, because yeah, she’s been patching her brothers and her father up for so long she could practically do it in her sleep, but also, just because she gave Svetlana a knife or whatever didn’t mean she signed up to play nursemaid to a bunch of whores.

Eventually, she agrees, because apparently none of the girls have a clue how to do it, and Mandy’s the only one left, and blah blah blah, honestly, she stopped listening. Anything to get Svetlana to shut up.

They have ace bandages handy, always, and Mandy wraps up the girl, who flinches when Mandy touches her. She even goes slow, tries to explain to both her and Svetlana what to do in case it ever happens again. They don’t have to say anything, she understands it will.

When they leave, Mandy reminds her to drink a lot and not move, and Svetlana translates, maybe, she can’t really tell.

Mandy doesn’t sleep well that night, she has this uncomfortable, nagging feeling in the pit of her stomach. It goes on for a couple of days and she can’t figure out what the fuck is going on, until finally she does.

 _What if_ , she thinks,  _one of those girls gets hurt some other way?_ They seem pretty helpless, at least as far as patching up injuries. And it’s not her responsibility or anything, but what could it hurt?

She makes Svetlana bring all of her “coworkers” over, and Mandy shows them how to bandage broken ribs, how to make bruises and black eyes go away faster, how to reset knuckles if they pop out of place from punching someone, and most importantly, how to tell if you have to go to the hospital.

"If you can’t breathe, if you’re puking blood, and if you’ve been shot, and nothing else. Anything else we can fix ourselves." Mandy tells them, and they nod like that means something to them, even before Svetlana translates it to them. They’re worried, though, because none of them have any money to pay for the bills, and Svetlana tells her this like Mandy hadn’t thought of that. She rolls her eyes.

"Just give them a fake name," she explains, "they have to treat you, it’s a law, and then just skip out as soon as you can."

She feels mildly accomplished, or whatever, and then the girl with the broken ribs, the girl who allegedly didn’t speak a word of English, looks at her.

"Thank you," she says, and if Mandy feels just a little bit of pride after that, well then, fuck you.

Mandy hopes that they’ll be able to take care of themselves from here on out, wants to wash her hands of this. This was Mickey’s stupid idea, not hers, and she doesn’t see why she should be messing around with them. This is the end of her involvement, she decides.

And it would be, except for a few days later, she catches Svetlana trying — again — to steal a gun.


	2. Look, Beethoven was writing symphonies at like four years old and if there was ever going to be a child prodigy of violence it would be a Milkovich.

Mandy has no fucking clue how it happens, but somewhere between the second gun Svetlana tries to lift, the third time she catches her brother passed out in his room when he’s supposed to be at work, and the fourth hand print Svetlana tries (and fails) to cover with cheap, drug-store foundation, she agrees to protect the whores.

The next morning, she slips a handgun into the waist of her jeans and she walks to The Alibi. On the way, a homeless guy with crazy eyes comes at her, and maybe he’s just going to ask for change or maybe he’s going to do something else, but Mandy feels the hard plastic pressing against her hip and she feels safe, doesn’t even consider crossing to the other side of the street.

Svetlana and the other girls are already there, milling about upstairs when she arrives. No customers, yet. She guesses that even the scummiest of men aren’t looking to pay for a hand job at 8 am.

She has one of the girls grab her a barstool from downstairs and that’s what she does. She sits on a barstool and flicks the safety of her gun on and off and she looks at the faces of the men that come in, tries to figure out how she would describe them to the police even if Milkoviches don’t talk to cops, ever. 

Mandy’s sure to flash her piece at every jerkoff who walks through the door and the girls hardly ever get hurt anymore, at least when she’s there.

Whatever. So Svetlana had the right idea, so fucking what.

Sometimes they get men who are obviously high on something serious, and those always skeeve Mandy out the most. She fucking hates junkies, ever since her mom. Fucking  _hates_ them.

They’re uncontrollable, unpredictable. They see her gun and they understand that she has a gun but that means nothing to them. They do whatever they please. They hit the girls and take more than they agreed to and Mandy always has to keep an eye on them, every second they spend there.

A guy comes in, pumped full of fuck knows what. Mandy looks at him, to show him the gun and memorize his face but his eyes, his eyes freak her the fuck out.

His eyes have a look in them that Mandy knows, Mandy recognizes. It’s a crazy look, a dangerous look, a look that sends cold all the way down her spine. She meets his eyes, dead on.

"No," she tells him. "Get out." Because this might be her brother’s stupid idea but she’s not about to let this turn into a fucking snuff film or some shit. And that’s where this is heading, she knows it.

"Get out." She says again, when he doesn’t move, and then she lifts her gun up, like she could use it at any moment.

The girls come out from behind they curtains that hang from the ceiling, staring. They want to know what’s going on, they stand in clusters and look between Mandy and the junkie.

Mandy stares at him and he stares back and then, finally, he leaves. He just about rips the door off his hinges, but he leaves. She lets her breath out.

The girls give her a hard time later, some of them with broken English of their own and some of them through Svetlana. They’re pissed that she made the man leave, that she lost them money. She lost them 13 dollars.

They don’t even fucking care that she saved their lives. She doesn’t show up again for a week.

She comes back, eventually, and fuck knows why. She doesn’t owe them shit and she’s pretty sure they hate her, but she comes back.

Except they don’t seem to hate her. They treat her like she’s in charge, which is fucking weird, to say the least.

They greet her as they walk in like they want her to know they showed up on time, and when they work late they point it out to her, like she’s supposed to do something with that information.

This is not what she wanted to do with her life.

And then they start asking her for things.

One of them asks her if she can have the day off. Mandy shrugs, because what the fuck does she care. Another one asks Mandy not to send her any more men with grey hair and tattoos, and it’s such a strange request Mandy doesn’t know what to do except comply.

One brings her kid in, a little boy maybe four years old who looks kind of like Molly. She says sorry to Mandy about ten fucking times and then promises he won’t cause any trouble, he’ll just sit quietly in the corner of her “room” while she does her work.

"No fucking way," Mandy says. "That’s how fucking serial killers are born." The girl stomps her foot but Mandy doesn’t relent.

"There is no place else for him go to." And Mandy rolls her eyes but she sees the fresh bruises on this woman’s face and reluctantly agrees that the boy can sit with her.

He’s a quiet kid, even quieter than Liam Gallagher, and that’s saying something. He sits in silence next to her for a few hours, playing on the floor with half a toy car.

She looks over at him, around lunch time, and sees bugs crawling through his hair. He’s got long hair, falls to his ears, and Mandy sighs. It’s been years since she’s had to deal with lice. But he’s scratch, scratch, scratching at his head like there’s no tomorrow.

Mandy takes the boy downstairs, makes him lean over a toilet while she cuts his hair down to his scalp with a pair of scissors she got from the bartender.

He giggles when she flushes the toilet, watches all his hair swirl down the pipes, and it’s the first noise she’s heard out of him all day.

His mom screams at her later when she sees what Mandy did to her kid’s hair, but he had lice, what the fuck else was she supposed to do?

She keeps bringing the kid, and she keeps letting him sit with Mandy, though, and it happens like that until it starts to turn into some kind of routine.

He’s sitting on the floor, playing with some toys she borrowed from Debbie, and she’s sitting on her stool on her phone when some 200 pound asshole comes through the door, shouting about how he wants his kid back.

The mom comes out and she shrieks like a fucking banshee and then she moves to grab her son at the same time the man does and Mandy thinks,  _Oh shit_ , and she raises her gun.

And then the hooker grabs the barrel of the gun and rips it out of Mandy’s hands so fast she doesn’t even have time to register what’s going on. If it was the guy, Mandy thinks she could defend herself. But the whore? The one she was supposed to be protecting? She didn’t even see it coming.

The girl points the gun at him and tries to pull the trigger over and over and all Mandy can think is that if she’s going to shoot the bastard, she’s going to have to turn the safety off, and maybe she should have taught them that in Whore Health 101.

Mandy can kick the shit out of just about anyone, has always been able to. It’s like her special talent. By the time she was five, she could beat up all her brothers, even Joey, twice her age. Her brothers would take her around the neighborhood and make bets on fights they stuck her in, like she was a fucking dog. She won every one. It’s probably her best memory with her brothers, something fun they’d do together and when it was over, they’d steal candy for her. It stopped a few years later when the boys started trying to grab at her tits instead of hitting her back, no discussion.

This is the first thing she thinks when that dickface punches her eye, so hard her vision goes blurry for a few seconds.

She hits him right back, watches her fist collide with his face and then drives her elbow down so hard into his collarbone she thinks she can hear it break.

He shoves her against the wall, her head collides with the dry wall and probably leaves a hole. Mandy knees him in the groin and then they’re on the floor, rolling around and throwing punches and Mandy’s winning, she knows she’s winning, even with a mouth full of blood and her head spinning. She knows he’s worse off. They keep fighting.

He’s on his stomach, she’s straddling his back with fistfuls of his hair, slamming his face against the floor over and over again until the blood blooms like a flower or whatever fucking tacky metaphor there is to make.

She stands up and she kicks him in the stomach, once, twice, three times.

He crawls — literally crawls — out the door

The girls are standing around her and she didn’t even notice until this moment, they’re standing around her and she knows she looks like hell but she can practically hear them cheering, even if they’re not making a sound.

The next morning, she shows up to work with a shotgun.


End file.
